Hello David,

I understand your original question is practical. I was asking if you ever actually:

select 255
use mytable

and I was proposing an alternative. If you USE mytable IN 0, SELECT(1) returns a meaningful result. Also, you can set a variable to the result of SELECT(1) when your application fires up, before any tables are open.

Why not rewrite the function using aused()? Are you dealing with some versions of Foxpro that don't have that function?

>Steve,
>
>No. Actually practical. I didn't know about the aused() function, which Sergey and others told me about. I had written a function that used a for loop - for i = 1 to 255, to check to see if a table was open in the work area, and then close it, except if it was in a list of aliases to keep open. But the thing is that I have some older systems that use this and similar functions, where I'm not sure if 255 is the highest number work area that can be specified - in fact in my tests today on vfp6 - the highest work area # you can specify is 32767, beyond that you get table number is invalid.
>
>I wanted to be able to change my existing functions to use a maxvalue number, rather than having to rewrite the function(s) to utilize aused(), and also, I'm not sure in what version of foxpro aused() was introduced. Actually, I guess what would help the most is to know the max # of work areas per foxpro version or per operating system, if that has any role.
>
>
>